


Flight

by zjofierose



Category: The Maze Runner Series - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Anxiety, Depressed Newt, Depression, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Protective Minho, Separation Anxiety, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-18
Updated: 2016-09-18
Packaged: 2018-08-15 16:12:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8063137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zjofierose/pseuds/zjofierose
Summary: It’s funny, Newt thinks, how he didn’t realize that he was lonely until he had company to lose.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I have NO idea what this is or where it came from. I haven't read the books, I watched the Maze Runner, like, twice. I'm sure it's inconsistent with canon, and it doesn't really have a plot to speak of, and the internal characterization is not great, and... ugh. BUT what the hell, I wrote it, I'm posting it, it is what it is. ...sorry?
> 
> The suicide attempt mentioned in the tags is the same one referred to in the books; I don't dwell on it, and it's not graphic, but it's definitely in there, so please be warned. There's also one moment of mild violence.

It’s funny, Newt thinks, how he didn’t realize that he was lonely until he had company to lose.

\--

He’d come third, after Alby and Stephen, rattling in the box like everyone before and after, disoriented, terrified, and alone. They’d welcomed him into their shelter, cared for him while he recovered for the first few days. (He thinks now that whoever sends them here must have refined the drugs they use to subdue the greenies- he’d been sick for several days from them, and so had Ben, who’d come up seventh, but the newer kids seem to do a little better.)

They’d built a life together, slowly, piece by painstaking piece. Stephen’d had a knack for building; a real sense of construction and design, and Alby had the patience and muscle to help, so between the two of them, they’d built a respectable small dwelling. With their numbers looking like they might continue to grow every month, though, they’d abandoned it and started over, leaving it to eventually become the Map Room, and laying the foundations for the Homestead. 

Newt wasn’t that interested in, or, frankly, that good at building, so he’d taken charge of everything else just by default. He had no memory of having worked with animals or grown crops before, but he did seem to have some common sense, which helped. Keep the animals penned away from the food; if something’s not growing where you planted it, try growing it with more or less light, and see what happens. The box sent supplies that were edible as they were, so they didn’t starve, but things were getting pretty tight by the time Joseph came up as number four. 

Joseph took over the animals, which was fine with Newt, and he also turned out to somehow remember woodcraft, which made a nice change from sitting on stumps all the time. His first chair was rickety, but the second held up, and by the time Frypan showed up with a load of kitchen supplies, there was somewhere to put them. 

When they hit six, there were suddenly enough of them for real social dynamics to form, which was an interesting shift. Alby’d always been in charge, both by having been first, and by virtue of his own natural personality and likely status of eldest. Some of them worked more closely with each other than others, of course, but even with four and five Gladers, there just weren’t enough of them for anyone to not spend time with anyone else. 

Six changed things. Suddenly people became friends; suddenly there were obvious seating preferences around the fire. Sometimes there were fights, and sides taken. 

It was at this point that they built the pit. 

Ben came up seventh, and then Gally eighth, and then there was an accident, a falling beam, and Stephen laid unconscious for two days before he stopped breathing and they buried him in the far corner of the glade. Gally was the one then who hauled them all over to the wall, and handed them the knife.  _ So there’s some shucking record of us, so they’ll know we were here _ , he said, and one by one they scratched their names into the rough surface before Gally took the awl and hammered a line through Stephen’s.  _ Who’s they _ , Newt had wondered at the time, but it hadn’t mattered. 

Minho came ninth, all easy grace and half-cocked smile, and Newt didn’t know what to think of him. He was too happy, too capable, too calm and affable in the face of Newt’s constant low-level anxiety and occasional prickliness. It rubbed him the wrong way, made him feel off-kilter and out of sorts in a way he didn’t remember, but felt familiar all the same.

The first time Newt had snapped at him, Minho had held his hands palms up toward Newt and backed away slowly, leaving Newt to slam his fist against a tree in frustration, scraping his knuckles raw and breathing hard. It was the last he’d see of Minho for a while, he’d been sure, but then not an hour later Minho came sauntering over through the chest-high beans, smiling and checking to see if he needed a hand weeding the next row.

They were inseparable after that- look for one, and you’d find the other. At chores, around the fire in the evening. Their hammocks hung side by side, and they took night watches together because Newt can’t sleep without the sound of Minho’s breathing right beside him. Minho still has other friends, of course- he’s a social guy, friendly to pretty much everyone, and useful at most tasks, thus making him often in demand. Newt… well, he has Alby, who is mostly like a friend, he  guesses, though more like an older brother, an authority, than an equal. Sometimes Newt feels guilty for monopolizing Minho’s attention, but the few times he’s tried to push Minho away, Minho just seems baffled, so Newt’s given up trying to save him. 

When the idea had come for there to be runners, they’d both volunteered: Minho, because he was born to explore, and chafed at the limiting walls that surrounded them; Newt, because he couldn’t imagine being without Minho. The next day they rose at dawn, waited in the chilly dew-laden grass until the gates open with a massive rumbling crash, and then they ran.

They ran, and they ran, and they ran. Every day they ran, from dawn to dusk, from the first gap wide enough to admit a body through the walls until the last possible chance to squeeze through the closing barrier. They built the map room on their rest days, marking their paths in an ever-widening circuit. Tiny pegs delineating traveled space until they collapsed into their hammocks at nightfall, sweaty and exhausted.

Minho grew lean and muscled, eating as much as Frypan would let him get away with, his body fit and strong from the running. He has an efficient stride, eating up the distance at speed without any wasted energy, can go for hours without pausing, can carry on conversation without getting winded, though he prefers the relative silence of his breath in the air and his heartbeat in his ears. 

Newt became skinny and tight, his small muscles compact under his ragged shirt. His gait was loose, his ankles rolling from time to time as he chased Minho through the maze, kicking up gravel in his wake. He could keep up, but he never liked it, not the way Minho does, the way some of the other runners seem to. He’s not born to it, not built for it, so he took up climbing instead, his lanky frame and slight body mass well suited to scrambling up the vines to the tops of the walls, hauling himself hand over hand as he scrabbled for footholds in the crumbling rock. 

The day he flew was beautiful; clear skies and birdsong. It wasn’t late in the day, he wasn’t tired. Not sad, or crazy, or any of those things they'll try to make him agree to being later. Except, maybe in that moment, he- maybe he was all of those things, because it suddenly seemed shockingly clear to him that if he just took one more step, if he just walked forward into this open sky in front of him, he would fly to freedom.

He didn’t just step; he walked three paces backward and then launched himself forward into free space, startling birds out of the vines next to him as he shouted aloud with surprise and exhilaration.

The bottom literally didn’t even occur to him until he hit it, all the air rushing hard out of his lungs as his left leg snapped under him, the pain of it sharp through his system in a way that ripped out of his mouth as a ragged scream. He's laughing and crying and screaming when Minho found him, Minho’s face white with shock and terror. Ben came, too, and Newt didn’t like that, didn’t trust anyone else to see him like this, but he wasn’t exactly in a position to complain as they hauled him bodily out of the maze, a straggling blood trail behind them.

He passed out at some point and came to in the evening, opening his eyes to Alby’s stern gaze. The camp noises were muted from outside the rough-hewn walls; supper must’ve been over, and the rest of them settling in for the night. Alby just looked at him for a long slow moment, then stood and walked to the door, opening it to admit the most haggard-looking version of Minho Newt’d ever seen.

“Why?,”Minho demanded as he stomped unevenly to Newt’s side, got a fist in Newt’s shirtfront and shook him hard. “ _ for shucks sake _ , Newt,  _ why _ ?”

Newt gasped in pain, and all his answers turned to ash in his mouth, pitiful inadequate fantasies and puerile whims in the face of his beloved friend’s distress. He opened his mouth, then closed it and turned away, unable to begin to defend himself, unable to explain.

He didn’t turn far enough to miss the look of abject hurt Minho threw him as he walked away.

The next day was the first day that Minho ran the maze without Newt, and maybe Newt didn't think this through (ok, obviously he didn't), because now he was trapped here in this bed alone and hurting and Minho was off somewhere else with someone else and  _ how…  _ he ground his teeth until they creaked, and shredded the edge of the blanket and couldn’t breathe fully out until he heard the shouts hailing the runners’ safe return. He listened long enough to hear the hated walls rumble closed, then fell into a deep drugged sleep.

They never talked about it. Minho stayed away for a week of days, until Newt was well enough to move carefully between his hammock and the fire, his heavily splinted leg aching as he hobbled around on a rough pair of crutches. Minho appeared in the hammock next to him that first night he was out, took a seat next to him at the fire just like always, and even if it was a little stilted, a little cold in the space between them, Newt wasn’t about to break the truce by saying a word.

Life went on.

\--

But now. Now Newt is waiting, choking on the heart in his throat, waiting and waiting and waiting for any face to show between the walls, but they are closing, and there is no. way. that Minho and Alby are going to make it, and Newt wants to vomit with the certain knowledge that this is it, this is the end, and there will be no coming back from this, no fix, no help, just an ending.

The shucking new kid, Thomas, does what Newt wants to do, and runs into the maze, and Newt hates himself for it.  _ Hates  _ that he’s paralyzed with his fear,  _ hates  _ that he’s too slow to make it through the gate even if he could unstick himself from where he stands frozen,  _ hates  _ that he is now alone, all alone, because Minho will die in there, Alby will die in there, the new kid will bloody  _ die in there _ and that will be the end of Newt, too, because without Minho… without Minho…

He sits down in the grass in front of the wall, because what else can he do? 

Frypan and Chuck come and sit with him for a time, then leave to tend to the rest of the group. It’s what he should be doing, he knows, with Alby gone and Minho gone, but he can hear Gally’s voice rising stridently over the artificial hush, and he just can’t go up against Gally right now, so he lets it all pass him by.

Sometime in the wee hours, when the dark has been down for a long time, and the dew has settled into his clothes, he gets up to go and sit in the meadow, back to the wall, because he can't’ be sitting in front of the gates when they open with the dawn. He knows that if he sees those gates roll open and no one is there ( _ and there won’t be anyone there) _ , he will completely shucking lose it, and he owes it to the rest of them to at least  _ try  _ to keep his head. 

Dawn comes. He sits, letting the early morning breezes dry his damp clothes. 

At some point he closes his eyes, and a little while after that he hears the unmistakable rattling groan of the walls moving, the sound like small mountains crumbling. After another passage of time, he hears the voices of the boys raised in a clamor, and he clenches his fists, ragged nails digging into the stringy meat of his palms. He’s too far away to make out the words, but it can only be bad. Can only be blood, or pain, or loss. 

He sits there, and continues to sit as he hears the footsteps come up behind him, the breathing as the visitor waits silently at his back. There’s a long pause, then the heat of a body settling behind him, and a muffled sigh as a pair of legs stretch out on either side of his knees, long arms wrapping around his shoulders as Minho plants his forehead directly between Newt’s shoulder blades and rubs his face back and forth against the fabric of Newt’s shirt. 

Newt doesn’t move. 

“I’m sorry,” Minho says after a while, the heat of his body sinking into Newt’s muscles, waging a war against the impossible tension with which Newt holds himself, always. “All I could think, once we were probably not going to die, was how shucking sick you’d be over it.”

Newt nods, once, jerkily. Minho’s continued breath on his neck is starting to make him consider the possibility that this is not just some hallucination, that he hasn’t just snapped under the stress of losing Minho and Alby at once. A mosquito settles on his leg, and he slaps at it unthinkingly, jostling Minho’s hold around him. 

“I’m not going anywhere.” Minho whispers into the base of his skull, and Newt knows it’s meant to make him feel better, but instead it just makes him angry. He throws Minho’s hold off and stands up, wobbling as pins and needles surge through his bad leg, stumbling and hating his own complete inadequacy as he struggles to balance.

“Don’t  _ bloody  _ patronize me, Minho,” he spits, stepping back, suddenly so furious he can barely see. He can’t breathe around the knot of anger in his chest, can hear himself wheezing like he’s been running again. “You go in there every  _ shucking  _ day, and you will do it until you die, or we get out of here. You know it, and I know it, the whole bloody _camp_ knows it.” Newt flings his hands up. “I am not some shucking  _ baby  _ to be coddled. I  _ know  _ you, and I’m not a fool. Don’t lie to me like I’m a  _ shucking  _ little girl.”

Minho holds his gaze calmly, doesn’t look away, so Newt steps forward and shoves him, hard, making Minho stagger backward. 

“Get the  _ hell  _ away from me.” Newt sneers, unable to stop the vitriol pouring from him, the blood rushing in his ears. He wants to run, to fly, he wants to never see Minho again, wants to never look away from Minho’s face, never close his eyes. “Go to that new kid, the one who saved you. Go teach  _ him  _ to be a runner, go follow him around, go help him save us all.” 

Minho slaps him hard across the face, the crack of it echoing through the space around them, and Newt draws in a shaky breath, shocked and relieved in equal measure. Minho looks equally surprised for a split second, but immediately strides forward and seizes Newt by the arms, his grip tight enough to hurt.

“You think I want anyone else? You think that  _ shucking  _ new kid,” Minho’s breathing hard, and Newt can feel the hot dampness of tears on his cheeks, but he’s not sure when he started crying. “You think that he means  _ anything  _ to me?”

He stands frozen while Minho ducks his head, then lifts it again and continues, his face controlled, but his eyes wild. “When you jumped, I thought that was it for me. When I found you at the bottom of that wall, all crumpled, and bloody, and…” Minho’s voice breaks and trails off.

Newt shakes off Minho’s grip and steps forward, putting them chest to chest, and wraps his arms around Minho’s silently shaking form. They stand, the dawn breeze drifting around them, carrying the sounds and smells of breakfast, the scent of the freshly bloomed flowers in the glade.

“You’re right,” Minho says finally, his voice muffled by Newt’s boney shoulder. “I will go in there again. Every day. But I promise you,” he buries his face into Newt’s neck before raising it again to continue, his voice tight and fervent, “I  _ promise  _ you I will always come back.”

Newt shakes his head, winding his fingers into Minho’s thick, dark hair and clutching, sure that he’s pulling, but unable to stop. 

“You can’t say that. You don’t know what will happen. That’s not a promise you can keep.”

Minho bundles Newt up in his embrace, and Newt lets himself go, finally, sagging into Minho’s grip. They are propped together, each unable to stand on their own, the sound of birds filling the air. 

“I promise, Newt.” Minho whispers, and brings his mouth to Newt’s cheek, gentle as anything. “We are getting out of here together. You hear me?”

Newt nods, and closes his eyes. He imagines, for a moment, that the walls fall away, the camp, the stones, the trees. They are flying through the air, weightless and free.

“Together,” he breathes, and means it.

  
  
  
  
  



End file.
